Without a Passport
by DragonyPhoenix
Summary: Waiting for Willow's passport to come through before she can leave for England is difficult or why Willow didn't expect her friends to be supportive when she was sent back.


**Note**: Written for a prompt at Taming the Muse: passport

**Summary**: Waiting for Willow's passport to come through before she can leave for England is difficult or why Willow didn't expect her friends to be supportive when she was sent back.

"If I change the channel, are you going to blow up the world again?"

"I didn't actually blow up …" Willow stopped, unsure of what she was saying. She'd been lost in a maze of thought, thinking about Giles taking her to England. Was it really to help as he'd said? She didn't deserve help. She'd killed Warren. That deserved, well, something else. "Huh?" Her mind came back to the room and she saw Anya holding the remote. Television. Changing the channel. "Oh, um, sure, go ahead."

"Anya." Willow didn't want to see but she couldn't help herself. She turned to look. Buffy was standing in the hallway, closer to the door than to the living room where Anya was keeping watch. Buffy wasn't about to come closer. Willow knew that. Buffy had been keeping her distance ever since the end of the big hug and forgiveness fest after Xander had brought her back from Kingman's Bluff.

The channels on the TV kept flickering one past another. "I'm trying to watch Oprah." There was anger in Anya's voice. Willow knew she'd put that anger there. "When you run a small business, it's important to keep track of trends, to predict what's about to become popular." The remote clattered against the table. "Oh, wait, I don't have to worry about that anymore because I no longer run a small business to run."

"Anya." Buffy's voice lashed out like the snap of a whip, but she winced as she glanced at Willow, only for a moment, before looking away again. "Sorry."

"That's okay." The words had become automatic. "She isn't wrong."

Buffy stared straight past Willow. "Anya, a word?"

"Oh, fine." As Anya rose, Willow, still staring at Buffy, felt more than saw the movement.

Willow couldn't hear them but she didn't need to. Buffy would be telling Anya to be more sensitive, that Willow was in a fragile place. "Tara was her world," Buffy was probably saying.

"What about my world? Why doesn't anybody care about that? I put my life's blood into that shop, and I mean that figuratively, not literary, because I can so be figurative. There's no blood magic going on in the shop so don't you go getting Giles riled up again." Willow imagined a pause. "Where was I?"

"Anya, I …"

"Oh, yes, the shop which is no longer there because someone thought calling down an apocalypse was a good alternative to grief counseling. That shop was my world, well that and Xander, and now it's gone, and I'll never get that copy of the Kama Sutra I'd ordered because it's being sent to the shop, the shop that's no longer there. Who knows what the postal delivery person will do with it."

Buffy must have completely lost the thread of the conversation by now. "Kama Sutra?"

"It's full of sexual positions I was planning to try them out with Xander but now I'll never get the chance because I'll never get the book. Our sex life will become dull and uninteresting, and Xander will leave me so not only will I have lost the shop but I'll lose Xander too."

Anya burst into the room and settled in at the far edge of the couch. "I apologize for that whole world-ending comment."

Willow imagined Buffy rolling her eyes. "That's okay." Anya wasn't bad company, at least she didn't mollycoddle, but if they had to keep an eye on her, and she totally understood why they thought they had to keep an eye on her, she wished it could be Xander she was sitting with but he, as Anya had put it, "still had a job to get to."

Giles didn't have a job either now that The Magic Box was history. He said he as arranging things in England. He'd been saying that for three days, ever since they'd realized that England would have to wait because Willow didn't have a passport.

He was avoiding her. Willow knew he was. Lock the door and throw away the key shouldn't take this long to arrange.

They'd told her that Giles was getting her help. Willow wasn't sure she cared. Anywhere other than here was good. If they did lock her up, it would still be better than this. At least then she could imagine that her friends stayed away because they'd been made to, not because they wanted to.


End file.
